The present invention relates generally to disposable absorbent articles such as a diaper, a training pant, or an incontinence pant.
Disposable absorbent articles are increasingly popular products. Use of disposable diapers and training pants now exceeds, by far, the use of cloth diapers. Further, advancements made in the design of disposable feminine hygiene product have produced products which offer improved comfort and utility and, thus, the use of these products have also increased. Advancements have also been made in the design of disposable adult incontinence products which are designed to control and absorb involuntarily bowel and bladder discharge associated with many medical conditions.
Disposable diapers are designed with structural features intended to enhance fit, comfort, and/or minimize leakage. In this regard, various structural designs have been developed and incorporated into diapers. For example, disposable diapers may have standing inner leg cuffs which are combined with elastic leg gatherers, such as the structures disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,704,116 to Enloe, and in U.S. Pat. No. 4,695,278 to Lawson. In these structural designs, the leg cuffs and elastic leg gatherers are designed to work together so as to retain waste within a central core portion of the diaper. In another variation, a pair of “T”-shaped cuffs are disposed longitudinally on either side of the central core (see e.g., U.K. Patent Application No. 2,216,393).
These prior art designs have been effective to varying degrees in containing discharge from a wearer's body. The complexity in these structural designs also vary and may require multiple fabrication steps. For example, cuff/elastic gatherer combinations require the creation of both a cuff and an elastic gatherer which must be separately applied and which must be engineered to work together. “T”-shaped cuffs generally require additional engineering and manufacturing expense to place a “T”-shaped elasticized gasket upon a distal edge of a cuff. In an alternate design that is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,643,243 to Klemp, a diaper is provided with elasticized unitary cuffs. Each unitary cuff includes multiple strands of elastic material and provides the sole elasticizing means for containing waste within the crotch region of the diaper.
Many of these diapers and other garments are also designed with an hourglass contoured shape which improves the fit and comfort of the diaper. A disadvantage of such contoured garments is that their design generally requires the use of complex high precision machinery to form necessary intricate shapes, thereby significantly increasing the production cost associated with the garment. Moreover, many of these garments are formed from rectangular absorbent articles, typically cut in assembly line fashion from moving webs. To form a garment from such a rectangular piece of absorbent material, material is typically cut away from the longitudinal edges of the absorbent article and discarded during formation of the leg holes. While such contoured garments generally provide a more comfortable fit, these garments may be prone to leakage along the edges of the contoured region.